"Adaptive" in the Darwinian sense, as in "aversion to homosexuality makes a creature more fit to survive and have progeny."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=natural-homophobes-evolutionary-psy-2011-03-09http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=homophobia-phobia-bad-science-or-ba-2011-03-22The work in question dates back to 1995-1996 and involves a four-paper exchange published in Ethology and Sociobiology. It is a dialogue between two influential evolutionary psychologists—Gordon Gallup of SUNY-Albany, whose work on human sexuality I’ve covered before, and British psychologist John Archer of the University of Central Lancashire. Their primary debate is about whether or not people’s aversion to homosexuality (colloquially called "homophobia," although both authors acknowledge that this is a misnomer because it is more a negative attitude towards this demographic than it is fear) is a product of natural selection or, alternatively, a culturally constructed, transmitted bias.
The author then goes on to suggest new research be done on this topic, since the opposite proposition has also been covered:
...most evolutionary research on homosexuality involves trying to locate its fringe gene-enhancing benefits. This homosexuality-is-adaptive-too approach complements a growing tolerance for gay individuals, such as, happily, myself. Gallup comes at things from a very different angle, instead asking why there is such disdain for gay people to begin with and—although cultures may vary in their relative degree of tolerance or practice of homosexual behaviors—why no cultures actually endorse exclusive, lifelong same-sex relationships.
Oh, and a bit about adaptive behavior:
Remember, adaptive behavior is behavior that simply favors genetic replication. So just as being cuckolded results in maladaptive, unprofitable parental investment in someone else’s biological offspring, gay offspring—even your own biological child—are less likely to reproduce, and are likewise genetically costly.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/263602The modern cant is that homophobia is “socially constructed,” which means that it is instilled by indoctrination into the sheep-like masses by power elites who find it useful to their self-preservation.
As with “racism,” that is all nonsense. Attitudes so widespread, in so many times and places, call for some deeper, more coherent explanation than the sub-Marxist gibberish of crackpot French intellectuals. So what’s the explanation for homophobia?
...
Bering doesn’t have any results of his own to offer; he’s just calling for someone to take up where Gallup left off...
The Left was quick to react...
The real issue here for the Left, as Myers makes all too plain, isn’t whether homophobia is or is not adaptive, it’s whether anyone who wants to research such a topic, or even just ponder it, is fit to be admitted to polite society.
To put it differently, this is not a matter of scientific inquiry, it’s a matter of social-status assertion via moral one-upmanship and the outlawing of dissent from ideological dogmas. There’s a lot of that about.
Pity the author of the SA article. Yes, he is a good lefty and homosexual, to boot. He just hasn't learned that some topics are taboo in some primitive sub-cultures.
I'd suggest reading them, as they also provide a quick & dirty primer on what is called, nowadays, "evolutionary psychology."
That intersects another post I read about the rationality of anti-intellectualism:
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/117902/http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400310Part of the problem is that the American distrust of intellectualism is itself not the irrational thing that those sympathetic to intellectuals would like to think...Scientists have failed to resist politicization across the board, and the standards of what constitutes science continues to shift from a living, vibrant, thoughtful understanding of the purposes and ways of science to a scelerotic hide-bound form-over-substance version of science where papers are too often written to either explicitly attract grants or to confirm someone’s political beliefs…
So, I see two main topics of interest (along with several others):
1. "...whether or not people’s aversion to homosexuality...is a product of natural selection or, alternatively, a culturally constructed, transmitted bias."This really is not all-encompassing query, but more like, "What color is the object, black or white?" which leaves out all the other possible colors ["Chartreuse!"]. There are more than the two possibilities, but science is not equipped to examine some of them.
2. The use of social pressure by politicized sub-groups to inhibit scientific inquiry.I am reminded of Galileo's scientific colleagues(1), who tossed similar arguments at him, instead of addressing the substance.
I do expect a lot of "tl;dr" responses. That would be a pity.
(1) No, the Roman Catholics did not go a-hunting Galileo. They had to be prodded into action. G's competitors agitated to get the RC church to take a gander at his cosmology. FTR, the Pope at the time was a buddy of G's and quite, ah, "inquisitive" his own self.
